4 ms·
And I've done high school calculus. It's a picture of a parabola, the derivative is very small near the minimum, and it can look kinda flat if the picture isn't
by hyperpape 2y ago
And I've done high school calculus. It's a picture of a parabola, the derivative is very small near the minimum, and it can look kinda flat if the picture isn't perfectly drawn.
Principles of Product Development makes the point that a lot of real world tradeoffs in your development process are U-shaped curves, which implies that you will have very small costs for missing the optimum by a little. A single decision that you get wrong by a lot is likely to dominate those small misses.
- hinkley 2y agoIt’s a picture of a parabola if someone put the y axis at the dotted line not the origin. If you want to bargain with people - and this fictional conversation is a negotiation - then don’t anchor the people on bad values.
- hyperpape 2y agoThe article stipulates that 5 is the value that minimizes execution time. So the value between 0 and 5 would’ve been higher. It doesn’t intersect the x-axis because you can’t finish the task in zero time. See the quote below. That said, while I didn’t think it was a confusing drawing, I now wish he’d drawn the rest of the parabola, because it would’ve prevented this whole conversation. > EM: Woah! That’s no good. Wait, if we turn the carefulness knob down, does that mean that we can go even faster? > TL: If we did that, we’d just be YOLO’ing our changes, not doing validation. Which means we’d increase the probability of incidents significantly, which end up taking a lot of time to deal with. I don’t think we’d actually end up delivering any faster if we chose to be less careful than we normally are.
- Dylan16807 2y agoHow is it a bad value? If you centered it on the y axis, that would mean your carefulness scale goes from -5 to 5, and that's just confusing.
- throwway120385 2y agoA more sensible way to present the idea is to put the turning point of the parabola at the origin of the graph and then show that 5 is somewhere on the line of super-linearly increasing schedule risk.
- hyperpape 2y agoThe article stipulates that 5 is the value that minimizes execution time. It could have put that on the y-axis, and labeled the left “extremely rushed” and the right side “extremely careful”. Maybe that would’ve been clearer, though I really think it’s clear if are charitable and don’t assume the author has made a mistake.
- hinkley 2y agoI guarantee you the boss in this scenario hated calculus or a skipped it. Also parabolas are algebra not calculus, but the same counter argument stands.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt's a U shape, you don't need either one for a U shape.